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Thanks to dynotoaqrimp for sharing this with me.

Dr. at the November 29, 2005 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of days ago there was a minor kerfuffle between Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, and Neil daGrasse Tyson, the equally friendly astrophysicist, over the correct usage of the term ‘atheist.’ It wasn’t very interesting to me. Neil can call or refrain from calling himself whatever he wants. To me anyone who lacks a belief in gods is an atheist, but that’s how I choose to use the word. Some people use it differently. That’s fine. If they object to be called an atheist, I will respect their wishes even if I personally happen to think they are one. I share Neil’s disdain for arguing semantics. If both parties have clearly defined their terms from the outset, then it shouldn’t be a problem. Good on you, Neil, for wanting to focus on real issues instead of trivial semantics.

However, that is not what woke me from my slumber. Rather, it was the following paragraph from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s elaboration in the comments after Hemant’s blog-post:

The concept that you can’t prove a negative is often applied to “you can’t prove God does not exist”.  This notion, while strictly true in logic and philosophy, is simply rubbish to the practicing scientists. That’s why logicians and philosophers, in modern times, make bad scientists.  We prove negatives all the time.

I know it might seem petty and needlessly nitpicky of me to criticise a man as awesome as Neil for something he probably wrote in all due haste in a comment to a blog-post – hey, I’ll confess that I’m not always as lucid and deliberated in internet communications as I could be – but Neil managed to touch upon no less than two of my pet peeves with pin-point precision: namely the condescension of many academics towards philosophers and the oft-repeated misapprehension that ‘philosophy’ or ‘logic’ somehow prohibits the proving of a negative. What follows is the response I made to Neil in the comments:

I’m sorry, Neil. I’m a big fan. I really am. But rather than supporting that philosophers make bad scientists, that paragraph supports that scientists such as yourself make bad philosophers. I’m actually astounded that a person like you, who usually has such an immense depth of knowledge would say something so profoundly ignorant of philosophy and logic.

First of all, qualifications out of the way: I’m almost done with my MA in philosophy, but any other philosopher worth their salt will also tell you what I’m about to tell you: no, it’s decisively not true – strictly or otherwise – in either logic or philosophy that you can’t prove a negative. That’s complete nonsense. In fact, if that were the case, how on Earth would you know, since “you can’t prove a negative” is itself a negative statement? Not to mention that any positive statement is a negative statement of a negative statement. ‘(p & not-q)’ is truth-functionally equivalent to not-not-(p & not-q) which again is truth-functionally equivalent to not-not-not-not-(p & not-not-not-q) and so on. There is no profound logical difference between a positive and a negative proposition, which lets you philosophically prove the former but inhibits you from proving the latter.

There are various forms of philosophical argumentation, but let’s go with simple deduction. A deductive argument is valid if and only if the conjunction between its premises and the negation of its conclusion results in a logical contradiction. That is, the concept of validity is itself founded upon the law of non-contradiction, which is the negative statement that “it’s not the case that p and not-p.” Which, wouldn’t you know it, can be proven formally as follows:

1) (A & ~A) [Proposition]

2) A [Conjunction elimination from 1]

3) ~A [Conjunction elimination from 1]

4) ~(A & ~A) [Reductio, 1 - 3]

You’re a great man, Neil. But, please, in the future refrain from saying that philosophers are bad scientists simply because you don’t understand philosophy.

Yours truly,
Heini Reinert

Post-edit: I should have mentioned that I borrowed my law of non-contradiction argument from here, since I didn’t feel like reinventing the wheel.

Alvin Plantinga - Image via Wikipedia

The discussion is interesting and well worth a listen. Although I think both sides could have made a stronger case. The moderation was mostly fair. However, I couldn’t help my bemusement that Plantinga was consistently ‘Plantinga; one of the world’s greatest philosophers of religion etc. ad infinitum‘ while Stephen Law had to make do with being just plain old ‘Stephen Law.’ I mean, sure, what do I know? Perhaps Plantinga just has these Übermensch qualifications to rival even The Stig while poor Law is inexorably left behind in the dust of mediocrity. But it did become increasingly comical in iteration as the show progressed.

The first part of the show was naturally dedicated to Plantinga explaining his argument. I shan’t explain it better than I already have. It’s a simple enough idea, and anyone with an urge for detail can listen to the show or read more about it online. The next part of the show was dedicated to Law’s questions, worries, and objections. Law – who by the way is currently relevant by having taken William Lane Craig up on his debating challange – started things off by questioning whether the probability of naturalistically evolved reliable cognition is truly as low as Plantinga thinks it is. It is entirely the right question to ask. Unfortunately, however, it led to an impasse very fast. Neither man was able to give any particularly persuasive arguments for their preferred probability assessments.

Stephen Law

On agreeing to move on, Law raised an issue, which could easily have been of particular relevance. I say ‘could have been’ because I feel Law dropped the ball somewhat. His worry was that even if we grant Plantinga his argument, it might just as equally lead to a defeater for theism as for naturalism. Plantinga’s theism entails an omnipotent divine creator with a desire to bestow upon us cognitive reliability. However, says Law, if our cognition then leads us to the conclusion that there is no such omnipotent divine creator, then we land ourselves yet again in murky waters. Unfortunately his chosen cognitive method of arriving at a no-God conclusion is the classic problem of evil, which Plantinga doesn’t find very persuasive anyway. I don’t necessarily find it as unpersuasive as Plantinga must, but I think it brings us somewhat far afield from the topic at hand. At the very least I think Law missed an excellent opportunity to bring Plantinga to task with a problem Plantinga seems to have created for himself.

The classic problem of evil is (roughly) that there seems to be an inconsistency between our actual world (it has evil/suffering) and the kind of world we should expect given an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent creator. We can easily modify this argument to bring it closer to Plantinga’s home. There seems to be an inconsistency between our actual world, in that our cognition is massively and systematically unreliable, and the world we should expect given an omnipotent creator with a preference for cognitive reliability. We might call this ‘the problem of bias.’ I.e. whereas the problem of evil asked “If God has the ability, knowledge, and desire to prevent evil, whence then evil?” our modified version much more modestly asks “If God has the ability and desire to make humans cognitively reliable, why aren’t we?” This problem is far less easily brushed off by Plantinga than the classic problem of evil. (I should note that according to Wikipedia both Fitelson and Sober, and Ramsey have mentioned a similar problem for Plantinga. I haven’t read their papers, though, so I’m not in any way trying to do them justice.)

As a matter of interest I mentioned Plantinga’s argument to my biologist girlfriend. She scoffed at the argument and suggested the – to her obvious, but to me intriguing – solution that since Plantinga’s examples of adaptively beneficial yet ultimately false beliefs are highly circumstantial, it would probably be much more cost-efficient for our brains to have true beliefs. Sort of like our brain’s ability to learn chess by the simple rules of how each piece moves contrasted with our brain’s inability to learn chess by memorising each and every possible legal chess position by rote memory. (My example, not hers.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

The University of the West of England Bristol recently hosted a panel-talk about the importance of philosophy. It is well worth watching in its entirety if only for its sheer amount of zingers. Although the topic is an outright assertion (and not a question) the panelists balanced each other out very well in their approaches.

I’m considering simply sharing this video with the next person, who condescends to my chosen field of study. Or to the next person, who makes a crack at my expense about unemployability of philosophers. Apparently, according to Grayling, the least employable degrees at the moment are technical degrees. Humanity degrees are the most employable. Then again, Grayling cites no source, and I doubt it means much which kind of degree is most employable in light of the current economic state.

φ

In case you were wondering the answers to the questions are:

1. Omniscience entails fatalism. ¹

and

2. No.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recommended further study: Batman and Philosophy.

¹Although whether that precludes free will depends on what you think “free will” is.

Image via Wikipedia

There’s this post over at Gawker with the shocking headline “A Majority of Icelanders Believe in the Existence of Elves.” What is the basis for this outrageous claim? Why, this study reported on Iceland Review, of course, which found that only 8% of Icelanders believe that elves definitely exist.

I must have skipped one too many math-classes in school and missed the one about 8% constituting a majority. Even if you add the amount of people, who believe in the likelihood of elves to the ones believing they definitely exist, that still only makes 25%

Gawker must have misread, right? The following, however, is part of their direct quote:

Only 13 percent of participants in the study said it is impossible that elves exist, 19 percent found it unlikely, 37 percent said elves possibly exist, 17 percent found their existence likely and eight percent definite. Five percent did not have an opinion on the existence of elves.

What the Hell, Gawker? Didn’t you even read what you were quoting? Okay, let’s be charitable. It’s true that a majority of Icelanders (62% > 50%, see how that works?) believe the existence of elves is at the very least possible. That’s fine. So what? So do I. Since elves aren’t, to my knowledge, logically self-contradictory there is a possible world at which elves exist. It might even be very close to ours.

I don’t really understand the questionnaire placing “possibility” between “unlikelihood” and “likelihood.” Unless the likelihood of something is either zero or one, it has no bearing whatsoever on the possibility of said something. Perhaps the researchers intended “possibility” in a more colloquial sense, but if so then they can hardly lament ambiguity in their results. In any case a majority believing in the possibility (no matter the sense) of something isn’t exactly sensational.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have no idea who these people are and I’m too lazy to research this in-depth. So pardon me if I judge them solely by the merits of this short conversation. The man doing most of the talking (hereafter ‘The Gambler’) seems intelligent enough as apologists go. Unfortunately he is not doing a particularly good job explaining himself. If you find this video hard to follow, no worries. I did too. Just blame The Gambler. John Ankerberg, the host, isn’t doing much to improve matters either. He clearly has completely the wrong idea about the topic being discussed and The Gambler is doing nothing to correct him. Quite the comical farce.

Let’s start with some of the misconceptions. As I understand The Gambler he’s talking about the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. The argument deals with the well-known aspect of the universal constants (certain fixed quantities partly governing our universe’s behaviour) that had some of them been altered ever so slightly, then life as we know it could not have existed. To use a popular analogy, our universe is like a machine with a bunch of dials, many of which seem carefully tuned to “life.”

This concept is hopefully understandable even without getting into too much detail. We can leave aside what those constants are and why fiddling around with them would turn off “life mode.” In any case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the age of the universe is sufficient time for “evolution to occur.” I’m not even sure what Ankerberg means by this. Given large enough reproduction rates any amount of time is sufficient for evolution to occur. Not to mention that evolution is entirely irrelevant. The driving force of fine-tuning arguments is usually the supposed improbability of life; not its diversity. Why would the laws of physics allow the existence of life at all, when they could have failed to do so even more easily?

The other main misconception is that the idea of multiple universes arises solely from the atheist’s discomfort with the improbability of life. Many philosophers, theoretical physicists, and quite a few authors have postulated multiple universes for all sorts of reasons. By all means let’s concede – as I did before – that:

Accepting the actual existence of many worlds in order to escape the existence of God seems arbitrarily discriminatory

This doesn’t in any way detract from the fact, that if you have independent reasons for believing in multiple universes (e.g. because they allow you to make sense of modality or because they allow you to retain determinism in quantum physics) then it dissolves the mystery of “fine-tuning” quite neatly into a weak anthropic principle at no added cost. That is to say, if you already believe we live in a multiverse for reasons nothing to do with theism/atheism, then you get to shrug your shoulders at fine-tuning and say “Well, I suppose there had to be life as we know it in one of them.”

Which leads us neatly into The Gambler’s critique of atheists, that we commit the Gambler’s fallacy. He likens it to tossing a coin repeatedly. The coin lands with ‘heads’ up improbably often. Atheists allegedly then conclude that the coin therefore must have been tossed prior to the ‘head’ run. The Gambler considers this conclusion fallacious because the coin might be double-headed. He is right in his assessment that what he describes is an example of Gambler’s fallacy. He is wrong about the dialectic.

This is closer to how the real dialectic goes:
Theist: “The universe is remarkably structured. If you fiddled around with some of its constants, life couldn’t exist.”
Atheist: “Surely you mean ‘life as we know it’ couldn’t exist? Maybe other possible “tunings” could support other kinds of life?”
T: “Alright, but that’s just speculation.”
A: “Sure. So the universe is unlikely. What’s your point?”
T: “So it must have been purposely designed! God obviously wanted life and therefore created a life-supporting universe!”
A: “She might have done a better job…”
T: “Excuse me?”
A: “Never mind. But hold on. Surely your premise, that the universe is improbably life-supporting, doesn’t support your conclusion that therefore a life-desiring creator exists.”
T: “How so?”
A: “Well, perhaps it’s just a massive coincidence or…”
T: “Yeah right.”
A: “Oh, I agree it probably isn’t. However, it’s still not ruled out by your premise and so invalidates your argument. Or maybe there are multiple universes.”
T: “Aha! That’s the Gambler’s fallacy!”
A: “It would be if I had tried to argue that there are, in fact, such universes based on nothing but the premise that it’s improbable that our universe should support life. However, I’m not the one arguing for a multiverse, you’re the one arguing for God.
T: “But surely God is more parsimonious!”
A: “Perhaps. But if you think I would have committed a fallacy in arguing for a multiverse, because the conclusion doesn’t deductively follow from our agreed premise, then surely you must admit that your God-conclusion is equally fallacious.”
T: “But concluding that a coin, which always lands heads up is double-headed isn’t a Gambler’s fallacy.”
A: “No, it isn’t. It is, however, an argument from ignorance. At least until you’ve ruled out other possible explanations for your improbable tosses. You evidently believe in God. Suppose God intervened in the coin tosses?”
T: “But the double-headed coin is analogous to God. What is ‘God’ then analogous to?”
A: “I honestly don’t know. Some other supernatural explanation for the universe being the way it is? Maybe humans will discover magical means to time-travel, go back in time, and design the universe.”
T: “That sounds perfectly ridiculous.”
A: “Not more so than your God does to me…”
T: “…”

I had a chat with the always impeccably dressed Robin LePoidevin about atheism, agnosticism, and some of his books on behalf of the Faroese Atheist Society, ‘Gudloysi.’ Despite the anger of the thunder-gods outside, it was both interesting and quite illuminating to take a peak into the mind of such a distinguished professor of philosophy.

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Where’s your God now, William Lane Craig?

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A while back I held a little talk loosely based on my Intelligent Design essay for the Leeds Atheist Society. I’ve had the video cluttering up my hard drive for a while but only now figured out how to convert and embed it, so there you go. The sound quality is shoddy and my accent is thick but hopefully I’m understandable.

If, for some unfathomable reason, you want, you can download the slides from the talk here.